In 2016 ACT reported that students, from families with an annual income of $80,000 or more tend to score about four (4) points higher than students in families that earn less than $80,000 a year.
ACT by Family Income
In 2013 the national average ACT composite score was 20.9.
With standardized-test scores like the SAT and ACT being a major (if not the primary) criteria for college admission in the US, a four (4) point difference is a big difference!
In 2014 similar results were reported by the Huffington Post and by the Washington Post about the ACT and the SAT respectively. And in September 2017, the Washington Post reported that the Achievement Gap has, if anything, worsened for the ACT: ‘We didn’t know it was this bad’: New ACT scores show huge achievement gaps.
TN Department of Education Data & Research website: tn.gov/education/data
IRS Individual Income Tax Statistics website: irs.gov/statistics
Tn. Dept. of Ed. Highschool Achievement Profile Data from the 2014 - 2015 academic year.
Using the 2013 IRS Tax Return Data we can plot a bubble for each (inhabited) zipcode in TN. And we can:
Make the bubbles larger according to the IRS’s population estimates for 2013
Make the bubbles darker according to each zipcode’s Adjuste Gross Income per capita (County AGI divided by County Population).
We achieve this by averaging the AGI of of each zip code within a County.
We avhieve this in a similar fashion by averaqging each districts’s ACT-composite score within each County.
We could calculate what percentage of a County’s Income that each student gets (but that’s going to be a very small percent).
We could calculate what percentage of a County’s Education-Budget/Expenditure each student gets (not as small, but still pretty small).
We could calculate the brute* amount of dollars each student gets.*
And Compare them to each county’s ACT score
### Perhaps surprisingly, the brute amount of dollars each student “receives” in a county (a county’s per-pupil expenditure) is not the best predictor of that county’s average ACT score.
We wanted to determine how a county’s education expenditure compared to its adjusted gross income as well as how that expenditure related to the overall Tennessee education budget. The following graph indicates that counties with a high expenditure-to-AGI ratio typically do not have budgets that make up a significant portion of TN’s overall budget. On the other hand, the counties that tend to have a lower expenditure-to-AGI ratio require more of TN’s total education budget.
Having heard the rumors of wealthier students performing better on standardized tests, we wanted to put this to the test. In taking the average AGI per return, we had a reasonable idea of the wealth of each household in each county. The plotting of this metric against the average ACT score indicates that a moderately strong correlation exists between the two. In other words, the data suggests that the students in counties with wealthier households tend to score higher on the ACT.